Crazy Idea #1: Converting My Blog Posts In Audio Files
Clermont-Fd Area, FranceYesterday, I discovered the say
command on my Mac. Its aim is to convert text to
audible speech, and it works really well. Then, I had the idea to create audio files
from my blog posts, because it’s fun, and because it could improve accessibility.
The say
command generates aiff
audio files, which is not really understandable by
the audio
html5 tag. So, I had to convert this output in a mp3
file. I used the
well-known ffmpeg tool, and that’s all!
Please, welcome Speaker, my fun work of last evening.
Speaker aims to convert my blog posts in markdown syntax to a mp3
file. This is a tiny
shell script I enjoyed to write.
USAGE:
./speaker [-h] [-d <output directory>] <filename>
I used roundup to test it. I love shell scripts, but to write them without any tests is a pain, there is often a condition which is not good, a typo, or something else. That often makes me crazy! roundup helps you write strong shell scripts. Here is my test suite output:
$ ./speaker-test.sh
speaker
it_shows_help_with_no_argv: [PASS]
it_shows_help_with_h_option: [PASS]
it_creates_mp3_file: [PASS]
it_creates_mp3_file_in_existing_directory: [PASS]
it_creates_mp3_file_in_new_directory: [PASS]
=========================================================
Tests: 5 | Passed: 5 | Failed: 0
To sanitize the text to speech, I used some regular expressions. It probably needs some improvements but it works pretty well:
# Sanitize markdown content
content=`echo "$content" | sed -e 's/[\*_]//g'`
content=`echo "$content" | sed -e 's/\[\(.*\)\](\(.*\))/\1/g'`
content=`echo "$content" | sed -e 's/:[p|D]/./g'`
...
For the other parts, check the code :)
As I wanted to provide my blog posts as audio files, I tweaked my templates to integrate an audio
html5 tag.
And I used html5media to render this tag in all major browsers (don’t know
if there is a better solution).
<audio src="/mp3/my-blog-title.mp3" controls preload></audio>
And to automagically generate audio files, I wrote a pre-commit script to build the audio file when I commit blog posts. That’s all folks!
If you like this post or if you use one of the Open Source projects I maintain, say hello by email. There is also my Amazon Wish List. Thank you ♥
Comments